The
word TOPOGRAPHY in most definitions seems to entail the recording
and visualisation of local detail in landscape, human activity (architecture
and the economy) and the unfolding of people's lives. Artists
described as Topographers were, it was understood of an inferior professional
status and aesthetic achievement to those artists who filtered the
landscape through their own subjective sensibility.

Cataloguing
watercolour drawings for the British Council exhibition in Munich it
struck me being perfectly possible at the time of the making of the image
to combine a businesslike attitude with extremes of interpretation. Prints
and Drawings were deliberately aimed at a clientele who were familiar with
the tourist spots of Europe - a celebrated Battle, a place where the Coach
stopped for the passengers to view a much vaunted vista. Tourists' Diaries
revealed how fixed was that itinerary, and how artists, seeking to
sell their work, were willing to work to this constraint. Given the fixities
then how wildly at variance were the productions of the British Landscape
Artists who celebrated the Lakes, Mountains and crumbling Cathedrals of
this Kingdom, the sublimities of continental Europe (Boney permitting)
and the exotic otherness of Distant Parts, with their terrifying Elephants,
scintillating Ice Flows and ominous citizenry.

Only
in scanning examples from the Topographical Colour Books did I begin
to realise how much lyrical feeling pervaded the Topographical image, how
many eccentric details were included in human dress and behaviour,
and how dreamlike the Travel images were, undistorted by Flies, Unreasonable
Heat, Banditti and Bedbugs that I for one associate with Holidays.
I remember that a major collector of these Topographical Colour Plate
books was the journalist and cricket commentator John Arllott. This
is for me what travelling should be, enjoying a glass of wine by
the the fire scrutinising an
artificiality of place in the form of an illustrated book.

Stylistically
there is favouring of the linear, the colour infill and the semblance
of an optical reality (Camera Lucida, Obscura) while all along the
observer's eye is lured deeper into this aquatint confection.